I found it hard to believe that something so foolish could have been considered by the W3C. Patents have no place in internet standards what-so-ever. A patent should be used to protect proprietary technology (that also has no place in an internet standard). Standards must be open and free or they will simply not work.
You note things like the rise in patents issues, particularily for software. Compitent people would recognise this disasterous trend as more foolish mistakes by the patent office to issue thousands of invalid patents. (Remember that these are the same morons that gave Apple a patent for using the exclusive-OR logic operation to display a cursor over bitmapped graphics.) You even mention Amazon, you would think that you would learn from that nonsense that patents clearly serve to do no good in the context of internet standards.
There are numerous other examples, the GIF file format for one. Please realize that the only good internet standard is a patent-free internet standard.
Please add my voice to the thousands of others that are upset about this nonsense.
some Quotes from:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7373745.html?tag=tp_pr
the policy may not discriminate against a specific person, but it does "discriminate against the free software community, and that makes them unreasonable."
The authorship of the proposal didn't go unnoticed. One commentator argued that it "has the ugly smell of a meat packer bribing the USDA."
"The net effect will become standards will take too long to become adopted, and not widely adopted should the cost of fees become prohibitively expensive."